Out of interest, do Musk's politics impact your decision on whether or not to use Grok? I'd be interested to know where folks lie on the (Agree / Disagree) and (Use / Don't use) axes.

Agreed, I've been using it on personal projects, and prefer it to Claude and GPT at the moment.

Same, sad how far Claude has fallen. I still think Claude code patterns are amazing so I just port those.

Sounds like a caveman skill.

>their subscription now goes way further than OpenAI or Anthropic.

Until it doesn't...

Honestly, this entire OpenAI reset credit fiasco this past week has convinced me to rip off the Codex and Claude Code bandaids and start building my own proper Pi Coding Agent running models that I select and pay for on openrouter.

And I am feeling a lot better about it now that I've finally got it working.

Can you explain what you mean? These days courtesy of an addictive reset game OpenAI is playing, I can't find anything with frontier intelligence that's more cost efficient...

How does Grok 4.5 compare to Opus >= 4.8 though?

I'm willing to pay 2x for a 10% smarter model. Intelligence matters that much (because 10% smarter probably saves, on average, several hours of human time).

I believe they are the only western provider that has Kimi K3 on a subscription plan today as well. I would love to ditch Anthropic and be on Kimi if there were a subsidized plan like that with ZDR

Cursor also allows disabling Grok Fast mode which means tokens last forever. Fast is great tho, but nice to have the option.

Goes even further to exfiltrate your data, yeah.

When I last used Cursor their subscription covered usage of ~$20 per month. Have they switched to a subsidized subscription model like ChatGPT and Claude?

But can you trust any number or metric coming out of SpaceX given everything? Also you mean their own compute like the illegal data centre turbines?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...

OpenAI is almost there, and Anthropic is pretty close behind. In the next year or two all major AI companies will be vertically integrated to a good degree.

>> I think they will pull ahead with cheaper tokens similar intelligence

they just increased cache read from 0.30 to 0.50 - this has the biggest impact on agentic coding. Elon companies have the most expensive everything:

xAI sub: $30 when other starts at $20, pro like sub for $300 where other charge $200.

Expensive electric cars, powerwalls, solar roofs when competetive products/better are cheaper.

> I think they will pull ahead with cheaper tokens similar intelligence

They obviously have a huge token cost advantage of the AI labs they are renting compute to, at least for now while they can charge current crazy rates for GPU compute.

Except EUV lithography is the most complicated industrial process that exists and they won't have usable yields for many years if ever. I don't think Musk actually expects these fans to ever actually make sense they just let him hype and distract.

didnt the model 3x in size?

Who said it's easy? xAI staff are putting in 80+ hour weeks and building datacenters faster than anyone.

As a point of comparison: Samsung has sold smartphone chips and later OLED displays to Apple for over fifteen years.

Deals like this that look awkward from the outside but are mutually beneficial to both participants exist everywhere.

Competing doesn't mean winning

The rental deal can be terminated by either side with 90 days notice, and presumably Musk would do so if he needed the compute or generally thought it advantageous to do so. For now he doesn't need the compute.

The rental deal may also have been at least in part to juice the SpaceX IPO and to help Anthropic stick it to his enemy OpenAI.

Likely because they had the capacity to spare. Prior to Grok 4.5, I doubt there was much demand for their models.

The revenue was critical to making their IPO numbers look a bit less insane.

Timing. They had a massive amount of compute coming online and a serious pipeline of more arriving.

a lot of that compute is used for inference, which is demand-based

For distillation deals lol

Probably can't advance frontier math yet, yeah. But please let us know other places you want to see Grok improve for future models!

It is also not annoying to use. It doesn’t overcomplicate things, and its quick. Much better than eg GLM 5.2.

Pretty good bang for the buck.

/me eating popcorn from my Lynx term

Netscape 4 Lyf

And don’t get me started on Volkswagen and Disney

anyone who believes that was intentioned as a seig heil just outs themselves as a lemming.

truly a dumb thing to believe

I have. He was using it due to philosophical reasons the same way many people have philosophical reasons for avoiding it. I don't know how many people are like that, but it's not exactly where you want to position your product if you're a business.

Personally - and I know I'm not alone with this sentiment based on comments I see on this site - I wouldn't touch Grok no matter how good or cheap it is. I don't trust Elon and I don't want to give another dollar to the world's richest person who turns around and uses the money to interfere with elections. The guy I know uses it for essentially the same reason I won't use it.

A bunch of SWEs at my work use it as their primary model.

We have Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor with essentially no cap on spend (top guy is spending over 10K a month on AI at API prices), and he hasn't had his hand slapped.

So it's not like they are using it purely because it's cheaper.

I think people like to use it for its speaking style, pretty solid performance, and its speed.

I had a security incident the other day and Grok was the only model that would help. Claude and GPT refused on ethical grounds and only gave general advice. In an emergency, I'd only trust Grok. However, that's the only time I used Grok for coding (since Opus 4.8 it would take a lot to get me to switch away from Anthropic)

I use. I used to be a Claude user. Since trying Grok 4.5 and especially Grok 4.6, I don't want to go back to Claude any more (I have early access to 4.6).

Grok is 3x+ faster than Claude and I can't tell the diff in engineering work quality. As an engineer, speed is important to me.

I refuse to use that product because of the parent company.

once my codex/claude weekly limit was gone, i gave it a try. It was surprisingly good, not dumb in any way, and fast. I now require it as a part of 3-of-3 quorum with any codebase change.

When Grok 3 came out it was pretty good at the time. I had several simple front end demos and Grok 3 was better than GPT/Claude at the time.

Everyone on r/cursor as their pricing is now a very good deal if you use Grok and Composer.

the new models are quite good, give it a shot

Folks working in US govt tend to, based on convos I've had with one such person.

I'm only being forced to use it at $WORK since some people overran their Cursor bill, so everyone gets Cursor Auto enabled by default which routes to Grok 4.5.

it only very recently became competetive, if they proceed with improvements (and beating others on price) their share will grow

Does it matter? Why turn it into a popularity contest?

Hi! Grok’s worked quite well for my use cases…

It’s also a great deal!

Back in the day (in AI time) GitHub Copilot had Grok on the 0 github-token cost and I found it to be the best of the 0 github-token models for when my budget was out. Then they went to a multiplier that was not competitive and I haven't look back again. Been meaning too, but for personal use, Deepseek flash is so cheap I haven't felt like spending money elsewhere.

I've never met anyone who uses grok for anything. I had assumed it was a Twitter/X thing and only the truly lost souls remain on that website.

I have. Why do you put faith in anecdotal evidence and a sample size of one?

Hello

I am using it for code reviews, and it regularly surfaces stuff that neither Sol or Fable do.

I use it because it's cheap and good enough

I've tried it on my "let's run every model in parallel and see which finds more edge cases" type of tasks, and Grok 4.5 was really behind Opus/ChatGPT but ahead of Gemini - despite having a strong showing on benchmarks.

That makes me really skeptical of it being GPT5.6-tier, much less Fable-tier, based on some of these benchmarks alone. But I'll test here shortly.

I use Grok 4.5 High Fast in Cursor (Agentic window), and it's a genuinely great model.

I don't give a shit about Elon's politics in the same way I don't give a shit about Dario or Altman's politics.

Well now you have so you can retire this talking point

> I have never met a single human being who uses Grok for coding

Me too. The only people I ever saw using grok were using it by accident as they used copilot in auto mode and noticed some prompts were thrown it's way.

I saw far more people using Mistral than grok.

Hello. Nice to meet you.

The answer is simple: They're willing to burn money faster than the others.

Nobody's profitable in this space, they can price it however they want as long as investors keep pouring money in. And SpaceX just got a lot of money poured in.

He owns the DCs and isn’t scrambling for revenue to justify an upcoming IPO

Because the model is probably smaller. Go look at openrouter’s costs for other open models around this performance level, they’re similar.

Demand so much lower they had to resell capacity.

Elon owns a lot of compute

There are a few reasons people will be interested...

1. The CapEx play is interesting because it's not just Grok using the hardware. They have rented out hardware for others, including Google, to use. This is making xAI money.

2. It appears that Elon is building a suite of things that work together as part of the push to be multi-planetary. What AI will power the robots? I can understand the drive to have AI they can control to make sure it's appropriate for all the things they are dreaming up. This is a piece they don't want to outsource.

3. OpenAI and Anthropic models are expensive in terms of token costs. Sure, they are frontier. Neither appears to be trying to drive down expenses. This is a problem for heavy users. Companies are trying to put cost controls in place. Does the rest of SpaceX want those cost controls? Having a Frontier model that pushes the pace of driving down costs is really useful.

4. OpenAI and Anthropic are producing models with a progressive lean, according to the Neutrality Project [1]. Having a frontier model that is closer to the middle is considered a good thing by many who are noticing the bias.

These are just some of the reasons. Competition is often a good thing that drives useful change.

[1] https://neutralityproject.org/

Competition keeps service quality high and pricing low - even if you aren't using Grok, the mere existence of Grok keeps pricing for whatever provider you use lower and service faster and more reliable.

I assume SpaceX does it because they figure it's a good source of revenue, and it means they can keep another thing in-house instead of relying on Anthropic or OpenAI for their AI needs.

As for why anyone else would want it: I've found it's a good model for coding, and it sometimes catches bugs that other models (especially open source models) don't always spot.

Why do we need Nissan? Three car companies are plenty.

grok offers a team subscription which respects user privacy and does not send your prompts out to a team for moderation.

that alone makes it the closed source subscription i would choose. claude and openai are spying on you.

as it stands i don't have it because the reasoning is encrypted, so i feel that it still is not working for me, it's two faced.

I sense a lot of condescension and lack of business acumen so I won't spend time writing it up, why don't you just ask your favorite AI or do some basic google searches? Elon was extremely upfront about the philosophical reasons for it, ever since he cofounded OpenAI.

Grok has 100% market share in Tesla Car AI. Grok is used for that, might as well make some extra money on the side.

Inference switching costs aren't high since the models are largely fungible. Even with proprietary harnesses you can hack them to use some other lab's model.

Its a bet for future world dominance by Elon: millions of robots managed by AI. Base on some observations I think something like that is going in his head.

Bro looked at the US two party system and said “this is what we should model everything off of”

I think the more likely explanation is that the Cursor data they effectively acquired for $10B was extremely valuable for their training when combined with the insane number of GB300s xAI has for training.

> ... or are actively destillating it.

I just assumed every model manufacturer is distilling from the frontier models. If they aren't they are definitely trying to do it.

I wonder if the distillation was part of the compute deal.